A typical pressurized-gas cooler for use with a compressor has a bundle of parallel tubes through which a coolant passes and a cylindrical housing that is closed at an inner end and open at an outer end. The tube bundle is installed through the open end into the housing and the tubes are connected at the outer end to a cover that closes outer-end opening of the housing. A gas inlet and a gas outlet are mounted on the side is wall of the housing, spaced apart from one another in the longitudinal or axial direction of the housing.
The pressurized-gas cooler can be used, for example, as between stages of multi-stage compressor system to cool the compressed gas as it is compressed in steps. In terms of design, the pressurized-gas cooler is a tube-bundle heat exchanger. The cover has connections for supplying coolant and withdrawing coolant. At the inner end of the cooling tubes that faces away from the cover, a fitting deflects the coolant so that it can flow back out the same end of the housing where it entered. A flow direction of the gas being cooled is predominantly transverse to the cooling tubes of the tube bundle. Hence heat transfer between the coolant and the gas is a mixture of cross-flow, counter-flow, and concurrent flow. The gas inlet and outlet connections can be individually mounted on the side wall of the housing, and are matched to the piping connected with the compressor.
Pressurized-gas coolers having this structure have proven themselves.